


English Vacation

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: Minato Namikaze and the Destroyer of Worlds [9]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Angst, Culture Shock, Female Harry Potter, Gen, Humor, Master of Death Harry Potter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 17:06:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15778377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: Jiraiya gets a hold of Lee's Hogwarts Admission Letter and team 7, plus retired hokage, go off to investigate Lee's origins. Meanwhile Lee becomes frustrated that no one besides her seems to realize that reality is in fact a giant illusion that is in the process of breaking apart.





	1. English Vacation

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory note that this is NOT CANON

Minato and Lee didn’t normally have guests in their apartment.

 

It wasn’t that they were against the idea of entertaining guests or even unprepared to entertain guests but more that there was an unspoken rule about the public and private lives of Minato and Lee.

 

There was something more private, more intimate, that could be expressed without concern inside of their apartment. Minato could shed the necessity to translate for Lee as well as to buffer her from the outside world and the outside world from her, and as for Lee, she could allow herself to believe that she understood things as they truly were and that no one would try to correct her.

 

Inside they could switch between the common tongue and English without batting an eye, talk about tessering, relativity, and everything and anything in between.

 

It wasn’t that Minato was against other people in their apartment but nevertheless there was something in him that hesitated when Jiraiya and Haru first visited. It’d been impromptu, Jiraiya’s insisting, because it certainly hadn’t been Haru’s idea.

 

Haru looked mildly terrified, probably thinking that it looked too normal considering Lee lived there too, he kept looking around as if expecting to find a hole to another dimension or one of Orochimaru’s dissected Lee clones.

 

And Jiraiya kept rifling through their things, “You know, I really didn’t expect this place to be so clean.”

 

“Well, we don’t really own enough to make it messy, sensei.” Minato said, not to mention they usually ate out anyway so they didn’t have to clean the kitchen that often.

 

“It’s actually mildly creepy how clean it is, squirts, that’s just not natural for kids your age.” Jiraiya said as he moved from opening drawers filled with clothing, inspecting Lee’s brightly colored English tunics and shorts that she sometimes would wear on off days, to the books and papers that had been placed on top of the wardrobe.

 

“I find it mildly creepy that you invited yourself over to rummage through our stuff.” Lee helpfully pointed out as she lounged by the table with a cup of tea, eyebrows raised as she watched Jiraiya’s movements.

 

“Hey, it’s perfectly natural for a sensei to be concerned about the living situation of his two least favorite students.” Jiraiya said before adding with that grin that he probably thought was charming, “You two are way too young to be engaging in the delightful naughtiness that comes when a man and a woman share an apartment.”

 

Minato spit out his tea and started choking, his face flushing red, and in a moment he realized that he had never thought about the fact that Lee was a girl and one day soon would fit Jiraiya’s definition of a woman and that there was a possibility that someday he and Lee really would be engaging in Jiraiya’s delightful naughtiness.

 

(And there was another part of him that had always noticed, deep in the depths of his subconscious, that beyond her poppy red hair and leaf green eyes Lee’s hands had always felt smooth and soft against his skin…)

 

Lee seemed perfectly unaffected, sipping her tea calmly, and replying, “You mean your favorite students.”

 

Jiraiya stopped, considered her and Minato, and then dully said, “No, I mean my least favorite students.”

 

Jiraiya returned to rummaging leaving Minato sit uncomfortably in the silence, noticing the gaping expression that Haru was looking at him with, and he just knew that the next day every genin in Konoha would think that he and Lee did delightfully naughty things in their apartment when no one was watching.

 

Kushina would think he and Lee were doing delightfully naughty things in their apartment and she would probably say something about Lee being… slightly more dominant.

 

Minato felt like his face was on fire and he wanted to die.

 

“Hey, what’s this, code?” Jiraiya said, and in his hand he had one of the origami containers that stored messages (Lee had called them envelopes).

 

“Hm, oh, that’s just _English_.” Lee said, barely having to glance at the letter, but Jiraiya was much more interested and had stopped all pretense of searching through their things to stare at the characters.

 

“ _English_? That’s the country you’re from, right? Where the village of _Surrey_ is?” Jiraiya said, opening the envelope and taking out the letter, his eyebrows raising as he scanned through even more of the English characters.

 

“What does it say?” Jiraiya asked, frustrated, looking over at Lee.

 

Lee raised a hand and used the grabbing jutsu to summon one of the other duplicate letters towards her and in an unimpressed tone read the familiar message on the envelope, “ _Eleanor Lily Potter_ (we’ll just leave that as Eru Lee), Apartment 3B, The Village Hidden in the Leaves, Land of Fire.”

 

She quickly cast the envelope aside, pulled out the letter, and began to translate it in the same tone using the same words she and Minato had settled on almost a year before, “Hogwarts Academy of Witchcraft and Impersonating Gandalf. Headmaster: Dumbledore Albus (Order of Merlin, First Class, Grand Gandalf, Super Gandalf, Supreme Mugwump, Isengard).”

 

They had never managed to figure out what a Mugwump was or what the difference was between a Grand Sorcerer and a Chief Warlock. After debating for a few days they had decided that there probably wasn’t a difference and settled for calling anything related to the English word wizard, a Gandalf.

 

It probably wasn’t the best translation but he and Lee had found much better uses of their time since then.

 

“Dear Eru-san. We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts Academy of Witchcraft and Impersonating Gandalf. Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment. Term begins on 1 September. We await your owl by no later than 31 July. Yours sincerely, McGonagall Minerva, Deputy Headmistress.” Lee threw the first page away and then flipped to the second where she continued, “Then it lists a bunch of things I’ll need… Three sets of black kimono for work, a pointy hat, one pair of dragon gloves, one cloak. A bunch of books that… No, we’re not even getting into the books. And we’re definitely not getting into the equipment section.”

 

Jiraiya just stood there, blinking, much the same way that Minato had when Lee first read him the first letter they’d received, “What is that supposed to mean?”

 

Minato and Lee looked at each other, because they still weren’t quite sure what it meant. Lee insisted the letters were a sign from God that reality was falling apart and that it had started spamming her with gibberish.

 

Minato was still on the fence about the whole thing but he did know that he didn’t think it meant that reality was really a giant genjutsu like Lee insisted.

 

“A year ago owl summons kept showing up to give Lee letters from _England_ and wouldn’t stop until Lee helped them win some skirmish in the summons dimension.” Minato said, as far as he knew the owls were still getting the letters, they’d just stopped flooding Minato and Lee’s apartment with them.

 

“Owl summons? Does anyone in Konoha even have a contract with the owls?” Jiraiya asked, clearly thinking it over, but the owls had never really talked about who they were contracted to or where they had come from.

 

They’d been just about as irritated by the whole thing as Lee and Minato were saying that they’d gotten the damn things off of owls in another dimension who also were very tired of the letters at that point.

 

“And what do they mean by academy?” Here Jiraiya’s eyes sharpened and looked over to them but they just shrugged.

 

“You said there weren’t any shinobi in _England_.” Jiraiya said and Lee nodded causing Jiraiya to add, “But here it says they’re inviting you to their academy.”

 

“Well, yes, but I don’t think _wizard_ equates with ninja.” Lee said, and it had taken a bit of explaining on her end when they’d gotten the first letter, to explain the concept of a wizard, “Not that there are _wizards_ in _England_ either.”

 

“Well, someone sent you this letter.” Jiraiya said to which Lee, again, shrugged which was her way of wordlessly conveying that in English the letter had sounded even more ridiculous.

 

Minato had actually blamed Kushina for it for months, because it was just the sort of thing she would try in there last few months in the academy, even though he knew there was virtually no way for her to learn how to write in English let alone be able to speak it fluently when Minato himself still had trouble sometimes.

 

Kushina hadn’t appreciated his commissioning an army of Lee-clones to rival Orochimaru’s whose only purpose was to inconvenience her at every turn. Although, when the whole thing had been sorted out, she actually admitted that she wished she’d thought of the never-ending nonsensical letters first.

 

Hers would just insist that she’d be hokage and that Minato would one day turn into a beautiful princess instead of an invitation for Lee to attend a wizard and witchcraft academy.

 

Jiraiya didn’t look nearly as dismissive though, instead he put the letter back into the envelope and said in a voice that sounded casual but was anything but, “All these letters say the same thing then?”

 

“We stopped reading after the hundredth but I’d think so.” Lee said before adding, “I really don’t think it’s all that important though.”

 

“Well, you never know, besides my old sensei might want to have a look at it too. Not to mention I’m sure the nidaime would get a kick out of actually seeing _English_ instead of just listening to you and Minato-kun whisper secrets and giggle at each other.”

 

Sometimes Minato really had problems with his sensei and wondered why he respected the man so much or why anyone respected him. Of course, that was why he did it, because it distracted you from what he was really after.

 

Like the fact that Jiraiya was taking this letter straight to the hokage and the hokage before him, perhaps even the shodaime as well. There was no hint of it in the casual way he strolled out of their apartment though, whistling a tune, waving the envelope back and forth in the air like a little white flag but it was there residing underneath the underneath.

 

Lee, for all her purposeful obliviousness must have noticed it to, because as soon as he was out of sight she turned to him and asked, “Why do I have the feeling that our lives just became ten times more complicated?”

 

* * *

 

Four men seated together overlooking the hokage’s desk, each feeling more or less as ridiculous as the next, huddled over two sheets of parchment and an envelope with indecipherable and unfamiliar characters. Next to this, far messier, was the working translation of its contents.

 

“Are you sure this is what it says?” The shodaime finally asked with raised eyebrows at the contents, even though he had been invited more for formality than anything else.

 

When Jiraiya had brought the letter initially to the hokage he had expected to be working on it himself along with the nidaime and maybe a Nara or Orochimaru (although Oro had never really had an interest in encryption or codebreaking for all his genius).

 

But there wasn’t really a point in that, because it wasn’t a code, it was another language with an entirely different script than the one they used.

 

So instead it had become a political matter, one which the current hokage felt it best to bring his two predecessors in for, as they’d come to be more or less unofficial advisors.

 

“Well, since this is the only sample of _English_ I’ve ever seen and Lee-chan and Minato-kun don’t exactly go out of their way to even speak it that much it’s about the best I can do. We really have to take Lee-chan’s word for the contents…” Jiraiya winced, because taking Lee’s summary of anything at face value was always a recipe for disaster. It wasn’t that she was ever… wrong, it just only made sense if you titled your head a little to the side and squinted.

 

“This is becoming a problem.” The nidaime said with an irritated scowl, “Not to mention that we’ve been avoiding the uses of an unknown completely unfamiliar language for years. This could be extremely useful for encoding.”

 

Unfortunately, that boiled down to taking language lessons from Eru Lee which was why it still hadn’t happened and Minato was the only one who had managed to pick up any of it. Minato probably only had managed because he’d been almost five at the time and he and Lee had that weird mental connection and probably had been terrifying twins in a past life.

 

“No one is stopping you, sensei.” The hokage said with a small smile, as if he was thinking the exact same thing as Jiraiya, and just picturing the nidaime trying to sit down and learning how to speak another language from Lee.

 

Lee-sensei, God help them all.

 

“Not the point, the point is that Lee said it talks about an invitation to an academy.” Jiraiya said before they all got off track, “She said it wasn’t a shinobi academy, and still insists that there aren’t any shinobi in her homeland but…”

 

But the word academy and the other words that Lee had associated with it sounded dangerously close to how an ignorant civilian might talk about jutsus and chakra. Magic was the word used by the uninformed and Lee had specifically mentioned witchcraft.

 

“But she was very young when she came here.” Hashirama completed for him, “But maybe this is a good thing. It’s been a year since they received the letters and nothing has happened since, if there is a hidden village in _England_ , this can be our way to establish ties.”

 

“And make contact with what remains of the Eru clan.” The nidaime added, still convinced almost irrationally that Lee couldn’t have just sprung up from nowhere, that some clan would have a history of her ridiculous blood limit.

 

“I don’t know if it’s a great idea.” Jiraiya said before hastily adding, “Look, it could work out great but… This means we’d have to send Lee-chan and Minato-kun at the very least, that they’d have to translate for everyone. Now, I like Lee-chan, I believe in her potential but I don’t trust her to translate for me or tell me exactly what someone else is saying. Not to mention, that if there is a hidden village in _England_ and they realize just how powerful Lee-chan really is, or if she’s from an established clan, then it will be very difficult to get her back to Konoha.”

 

They would make a kidnapping attempt, if Jiraiya was kage he would be planning as soon as she set one foot on the country’s soil, ANBU would be following her every move and just waiting for an opportunity to strike.

 

Only a great fool of a kage would let that sort of power, power that had been born in their own village, walk in and back out again.

 

“They also might not, we know nothing about this village, or even if there is a hidden village at all.” Hashirama said before wistfully adding, “After all, Konoha wasn’t even a concept before Madara and I came together.”

 

Jiraiya had never lived during that time though, had grown up inside the village, so it was hard to conceive a world without a village or a world without hidden villages that would still invite children to an academy that taught jutsus.

 

They could just walk away, ignore it, but then perhaps one day England really would come to them. These might be the best terms they received, and better to know your enemies and friends now, then to realize you should have sought them out later.

 

“Well, I hope to God there aren’t any plant zombies in _England_.” Maybe they could finally get in a decent pseudo C-rank for once even if all the unknown elements could stick it anywhere from C to A.

 

* * *

 

“No way.”

 

Jiraiya looked at her, looking disappointed, as if she’d just crushed all his hopes and dreams but for all she cared he could continue to look like that. There was no way in hell that she was going to teleport to England.

 

As far as she was concerned, and had been concerned for the past seven years, England didn’t even really exist anymore.

 

Konoha, while flawed, was just so much better than England had ever been that there was no competition. There was no reason to go back and the idea had never even occurred to her until Jiraiya had come out of nowhere saying that it was time to pack up and visit Lee’s homeland.

 

“Hokage’s orders, Lee-chan, afraid it isn’t something you have a choice in.” Jiraiya said and that had sealed the deal on many things but visiting the Dursleys, in its own way, was much worse than dealing with Tora the demon cat.

 

“There’s nothing even worth seeing there!” At least, not when she’d been there, the most exciting her days had ever gotten was finding new ways to outrun Dudders when he got bored of the television. Most of the time the place had been hopelessly dull and when it wasn’t dull it was empty, as if it was hollow and only the image of the world remained within it. 

 

“Clearly, according to your letters, there is.” Jiraiya said, waving the stupid Hogwarts letter in her face again, “So we’re going, we’re going to see what the fuss is about, and then we’re going to report back.”

 

“But there’s nothing to see!” Lee cried, almost tearing her hair out, but her sensei wasn’t even listening anymore had really stopped listening to her a long time ago and now only would listen to her if Minato verified it.

 

She looked to Minato, her last chance, but he looked torn and not convinced that there was absolutely nothing worth seeing in Surrey whatsoever. She’d told him already, had told him even when they first met, but something about England just seemed exotic to him and always had no matter how many times she’d told him it wasn’t.

 

Minato wanted to go to England.

 

And if Minato wanted to go to England, Jiraiya wanted her to go to England, and now the hokage wanted her to go to England she more or less had no choice than to go to England.

 

“Well, if there’s nothing to see then we’ll just head back early.” Jiraiya said with a shrug, “Besides, the nidaime’s wanted to go to England ever since you brought him back from the dead, you can’t disappoint him now.”

 

Now even the nidaime hokage wanted to go to England.

 

She felt herself sinking to the grown, sitting, disappearing into the earth like a very determined mole who never wanted to see the sunlight or people who wanted to go to England ever again.

 

“…Lee-chan?” Jiraiya asked, somewhere in the distance.

 

She looked up, at the dubious face of Dead Last, at Minato’s raised and worried eyebrows, at Jiraiya, and said simply, “When we get there, I will tell you that I told you so, and you will have no choice but to listen.”

 

* * *

 

Everything Lee had ever said about her aunt, uncle, and cousin, since she and Minato had first started communicating had been more or less alarming. Over the years a very bleak picture had come together, to the point where he understood why it was that Lee seemed so indifferent to the prospect of blood family.

 

He didn’t know if she had really lived in a cupboard, he didn’t know if she had been forced to do D-ranks without pay, he didn’t know if her uncle would scream at her and sometimes hit her, he didn’t know if she’d almost been eaten by her aunt’s dogs, but he knew that she had never once looked back to England after she arrived in Konoha.

 

But at the same time England had always held a sort of mysticism for him simply because it was so foreign. A place where they didn’t wear kimono, where film theaters were more common than kabuki, where they had sent men to the moon in flying ships made of metal, where chakra didn’t seem to exist at all, where there were ten thousand languages each sounding different than the next, where everything was fantastic and unfamiliar.

 

He had wondered sometimes what it would be like to see it for himself, instead of hearing stories second hand from Lee, tales of Shakespeare, Star Wars, and everything in between.

 

When the five of them had arrived he began to realize just why Lee had been so insistent on walking away and never turning back.

 

Lee’s teleportation jutsu was always disorienting, she always seemed more or less fine, but every time Minato got pulled along with her there was a moment where his head spun and his stomach did backflips and he would be two seconds away from vomiting. One day, he thought to himself, he’d master teleportation as well just so that he would never have to deal with that nauseous feeling again.

 

This time was even worse than that, it was painful, he could feel himself stretching and his bones shaking as Lee pulled them further than she ever had before. The experience, the moving, itself seemed to take longer than it usually did and he could feel himself being pulled in all directions.

 

And when they arrived it wasn’t into an open field or spacious room but instead inside somewhere small and dark with spider webs in the corners and dust caked on the floor. They didn’t even really all fit, and instead were more or less entangled, sensei somehow managing to barely squeeze himself into the place.

 

“Uh, Lee, did you mean to bring us… here?” Haru asked, his face inches away from Minato’s, looking a little more green than Minato would have liked given their positions. (If Haru threw up on him, so help Minato, he could not be held responsible for his actions)

 

“I can only teleport places I’ve been and the cupboard’s the place I remember the best.” Lee said, somewhere to his left, tangled up with the nidaime, “I spent some good quality time in this cupboard I’ll have you know.”

 

“Well, I would rather not.” The nidaime said and then asked, “Who’s closest to the door?”

 

“I think that’s me, or my foot.” Jiraiya said before adding “I don’t think they really built this place for people my size.”

 

Looking around, at the ceiling, the floor, and at the drawings left untouched on the wall (green fields and blue skies, trees and flowers, all in too bright colors but with exquisite details) he felt something in him curdle as he realized that Lee once did have to make do with this place.

 

There was a large crack as Jiraiya kicked open the door and they all came tumbling out into bright and artificial light and as they did they were met with a woman’s scream. The nidaime and Jiraiya were on their feet in a second with hands ready for seals, Minato and Lee a half second behind, but then it became clear that this was not someone bleeding or dying or even an enemy but a shocked and horrified woman staring in horror and rage at them, and at Lee.

 

(But there was steel in Lee’s eyes, the kind that had lingered after she had faced her regenerating plant jonin, as if this woman was just as dangerous as any enemy ninja.)

 

“ _You! You… You left! You disappeared!_ ” The woman screamed, rapidly in English, and her expression was torn between rage, grief, and old bitterness that had long since gone sour.

 

“ _Well, it wasn’t exactly my idea to come crawling back either._ ” Lee said, more or less casually, but her fingers still terribly motionless and two seconds away from summoning a kunai or else a shuriken.

 

A bright smile (the fake kind that would close like a shutter over her face) appeared and she turned, forced herself to turn, from the woman to team seven and the nidaime, “Everyone, this is my Aunt Petunia, she is… Probably not a real person. _Aunt Petunia, this is everyone._ ”

 

There wasn’t much of a resemblance between the woman and Lee. They were both leaner than most, taller, but this woman had a pinched and bitter look to her that Lee had never had. She was brittle, thin, and everything about her was unwelcoming and severe.

 

 _“…The freaks, oh, I know who these people are. I know perfectly well who these freaks of nature are! I thought they would come for you later, like they did with my sister, but they came early didn’t they? And now they’ve come back to leave you here with us again, got tired of you, found out you weren’t what they wanted after all. Just like they did when they put you on our doormat the night your parents died._ ” The woman pointed at Lee then to the side, where another taller door was, presumably one that led out of the house, _“But you are not welcome here anymore, Eleanor Lily Potter. So I suggest you get out, stay out, and never think about coming back.”_

 

They stood in silence, in this unfamiliar hallway, one filled with more pictures than Minato imagined could have been taken (pictures were for the wealthy and for administrative purposes, to see so many, of seemingly inane moments was unthinkable), and with furniture whose styles were just as alien as Minato might have predicted.

 

But Minato couldn’t think about that, instead he could only look between this civilian (clearly painfully civilian) woman, and Lee and wonder why he couldn’t even process what was happening.

 

Jiraiya placed a hand on Lee’s shoulder, causing her to twitch, but at the sight of his expression (a tired, pained, and angry thing) she relaxed somewhat, “Let’s go, kid.”

 

“Didn’t you want to talk with my clan?” Lee asked, somehow more dully than usual, hesitating over the word clan and then spitting it out as if it burned her tongue.

 

Jiraiya looked at the woman again, something dangerous glinting in his eyes, and then glanced over at the nidaime whose expression was more unreadable. Minato looked back to the broken door they had just exited from, the dark hole, the thick futon shoved into the back and those bittersweet brightly colored pictures on the wall.

 

“No, I think we’ve seen enough of your clan.”

 

Lee nodded and without another word to her aunt, or to the rest of them, stiffly walked outside the door and into the midday sunlight and an alien world. Every house looked exactly the same, or almost, they were the same shade and the same model, only small human differences distinguished them. Otherwise looking in either direction it appeared as if these white identical houses extended forever, separated by a river of black concrete, and perfectly square fields of grass.

 

They stood, blinking and dazed in the sunlight, but Lee seemed to think nothing of it. Instead strode purposefully forward as if this was any street in Konoha and leaving them to trail behind.

 

“What is this place?” Haru asked, looking around in a daze, flushing when children on the streets stopped, stared, and pointed as if they were the ones who were alien here.

 

“The _suburbs_ , civilian central basically.” Lee said, as if she found this mildly irritating, and while that was familiar she was still too stiff (if they were alone, in their own apartment, Minato and her might talk about it but here in front of everyone she would let it simmer and fester inside her).

 

“Everyone’s a civilian here?” Haru asked again.

 

“That’s not so unusual, hidden villages are actually quite rare, most villages are comprised almost entirely of civilians.” The nidaime said, “The Land of Iron, in fact, is a country which itself has almost no shinobi and has no hidden village.”

 

But it was odd to Minato too, to think there were places which were almost entirely absent of shinobi. Where people would stop, stare, and point at their hitaei (although Minato knew that was not all that these children were pointing at).

 

“This is the village of _Surrey_?” The nidaime asked, and although he hid it better than Haru was, it seemed he was out of his element too.

 

“A part of it, _Little Whinging_ , if you want to be specific.”

 

They reached what looked like it could have been training equipment, poles sticking in the ground with bars that one could climb across, but it was filled with small children who looked as if they were doing anything but training.

 

Lee jumped onto the roof of one of the structures and they followed, staring with her out onto the street, “So here it is, gentlemen, _England_ in all of its glory.”

 

All of its glory, and maybe if they hadn’t met that woman first, maybe if Lee now didn’t seem so very tense, maybe it would have been glorious. But Minato couldn’t see it, everything he saw (cars everywhere, the pavement, the strange metal structure he was sitting on), seemed tinted by unspoken bitterness.

 

“Lee,” He said, looking at her face, at the way it gave nothing away in that moment, “What happened back there with your aunt?”

 

“It appears that I have been thrown out of _Number 4 Privet Drive_.” Lee said with a shrug as if this couldn’t be helped, was a fact of life that could not be questioned or circumvented.

 

“I know that, but I meant…”

 

“She’s always been like that, they all have, it doesn’t bother me. They can’t help it, after all, they are fundamentally inhuman.”

 

(And there it was, what she’d always said about them, and suddenly it made sense. Because Lee couldn’t find a reason why that woman would hate her so much, would throw her out of her house when she had been missing for seven years, so she had come up with the only logical solution she could think of.

 

That her aunt, uncle, and cousin didn’t really exist.

 

That reality itself didn’t really exist, that it was a genjutsu, one with contradictory elements and rules.

 

One that did not even bother to hide itself.

 

And something inside of Minato was tearing at the thought of that because he had never thought to ask himself why she had been so certain. And he never would have believed it if she tried to tell him.)

 

“Well, right, there’s that. So, any idea how we find these letter writing people?” Jiraiya asked, after they’d sat for a moment in silence, each thinking over the ramifications of what Lee had just said.

 

“Nope.” Lee said.

 

“What do you mean no?”

 

“It just said return by owl.” Lee said and added, “Plus we already even tried that and the owl summons didn’t want to touch the things.”

 

“Well then why don’t we find an owl and…”

 

“Jiraiya-sensei, do you see any owls here?” Lee asked, motioning around to the playground, “Do you see any birds for that matter? We’d probably be luckier if we tried to send it by cat. Plus, I’m pretty damn sure the letter isn’t even real.”

 

“Why…”

 

“Because nothing has ever been real in _England_! It’s like a fundamental place of non-reality, and it isn’t even good at it. It sends you letters about _wizards_ through owls; there’s just something weird about that.”  Lee said, a bit too loudly, as the children who had already been staring at them continued to stare harder and their mothers appeared to grow concerned.

 

“ _Eleanor? Eleanor Potter?!_ ”

 

Lee’s head whipped down to look at an elderly and very strangely dressed civilian woman with large thick glasses. Lee blinked, apparently stunned, then asked, “ _Mrs. Figg?_ ”

 

* * *

 

Mrs. Figg’s house was still filled with too much lace and too many pictures of cats. Only, now that Lee was a genin and not just a four-year-old little girl, she noted that the cats probably were nin cats. There really was no other way to explain their watchful herd like behavior and the way they prowled around the five of them.

 

Of course, the idea of Mrs. Figg being a ninja with enough chakra to employ dozens of summons at a time was frankly ridiculous, so she pinned it down to England being England.

 

She had forgotten how very English England truly was over the course of her time in Konoha. She supposed it was good for her to have a reminder or two, of course, it didn’t mean she liked it.

 

Mrs. Figg had kindly provided tea for them, which none of them took, and instead watched as Mrs. Figg ate and drank rather awkwardly by herself.

 

“ _Ellie, my dear, we were all so worried when you disappeared. What happened? Where have you been all this time? Have you been safe, well, are these your friends?_ ”

 

Lee, for her own part, was wondering who she meant by ‘we’. As far as Lee had known there was no one who would care about her disappearance. The Dursleys would be inconvenienced by being shorthanded but they also wouldn’t have her freakishiness, which must be a pleasant change. Mrs. Figg she hadn’t even bothered to consider.

 

(Quietly Minato was translating for Mrs. Figg to the rest of her captive audience, his voice hushed and his eyes darting between Mrs. Figg and Lee and back again. Minato was restless, almost as restless as Lee was in this place, really it would be best if they just got all of this over with and went home already.)

 

“ _I immigrated to the Village Hidden in the Leaves and became a genin, so I’m relatively safe, and these are my teammates… And the honorable second Shadow of Fire.”_ Lee said, motioning to her teammates and then the nidaime in turn.

 

Mrs. Figg, far from being reassured by this explanation, looked a bit more alarm, “ _I’m, sorry, my dear… You went where and did what?_ ”

 

“ _I immigrated to the Village Hidden in the Leaves and became a ninja._ ” Lee said, although judging by Mrs. Figg’s expression this second explanation was working just as well as her first attempt, which was to say not at all.

 

“Lee, see if she can do something about the letter.” Jiraiya said, pushing the letter into her hands, and maybe he was desperate because this was the first person who was actually talking to them and not throwing them out of their house but the idea of Mrs. Figg having any hand in the English wizard spamming scheme was more than a little bizarre.

 

Of all the people Lee could have blamed she never would have suspected crazy Mrs. Figg.

 

Regardless she pushed the letter over to Mrs. Figg, “ _I started getting spam about a year ago…_ ”

 

Mrs. Figg’s eyes lit up in comprehension though, “ _Oh, that must be your Hogwarts letter!_ ”

 

What.

 

Lee felt all of her thoughts drift from her, exiting away as she was forced to come to the conclusion that Mrs. Figg, Mrs. Figg who owned at least a dozen cats, was involved in the Hogwarts letter scheme and possibly the mastermind behind the whole thing.

 

It was happening again, the genjutsu, it was messing with the very fabric of reality and no one else seemed capable of noticing.

 

Because no one knew Mrs. Figg and soon there would be some sort of half assed explanation and everyone would nod their heads and move on as if it wasn’t completely bizarre and incomprehensible that Mrs. Figg had been sending her spam about wizards for a year.

 

Only Lee, only Lee, ever dared to keep track of these inconsistencies, and somewhere the asshole that had casted the genjutsu was laughing his ass off.

 

And soon enough there was Mrs. Figg, prattling on, leaving Minato to translate and flounder over unfamiliar (and frankly hard to translate words) like witch and wizard and wand and Hogwarts and Scotland and you were supposed to be in Scotland magic school a year ago, Lee.

 

And then there was a fireplace jutsu that looked like a mix between teleportation and a bloody phone system and then other people were coming in, all dressed in brightly colored robes and pointy hats, looking old and wise and not at all lethal.

 

And Lee was done.

 

* * *

 

When the letters had gone out in 1991, the year that Eleanor Potter would have been old enough to attend Hogwarts, the world had held its breath. But unfortunately, while the letter had been sent out, it had never returned and on the first of September Eleanor Potter remained missing.

 

Not dead, Albus had insisted on that, perhaps in mortal peril from time to time but not dead either. Just… nowhere to be found.

 

Minerva had raged at him for that, to think that he had put the girl with her relatives and then lost her, lost her before she’d even turned five and hadn’t bothered to tell anyone for years but Severus.

 

It’d only gotten worse when she’d gone to meet the Dursleys herself. She knew there had been a falling out between Lily and her sister, that Lily’s sister and brother in law had not attended her and James’ wedding, that Lily had hesitated to visit her sister or even include her in her will, but she had never thought that human beings could be so vile.

 

The boy was a pig, the husband worse, and Lily’s sister… She wasn’t Lily.

 

There was some regret there, some bitterness, rage, disbelief, that they had lost Eleanor Potter while she had been in their care but it was hidden beneath a very thick wall of apathy and relief. As if they were glad to be rid of her and her kind forever.

 

And she was just gone, like she’d never been there in the first place, there one morning they said and then gone in the blink of an eye. And no one had seen her since.

 

After twelve years of seeing neither hide nor hair of the girl Minerva had begun to lose hope.

 

But then, much like the seemingly ordinary day Eleanor Lily Potter had disappeared, she returned with just as little fanfare. There was a call from Arabella Figg (who had already tried Dumbledore and just missed him), to come quickly because the girl who lived had returned with a strange group of foreign men asking about her Hogwarts letter, and then Minerva was off.

 

Not even thinking about what she was going to say to the girl, if she was going to introduce Hogwarts the way she would to any student, if she would talk about the girl’s mother and father (who it seemed her bloody relatives had taken to calling drunkards), if she would talk about the night her parents had died and she had become an orphan while the rest of the country had been saved.

 

She didn’t think, she just went, without even sending a patronus to Albus and telling him that the girl-who-was-lost was now the girl-who-was-found.

 

So perhaps it was natural that when she stumbled into Arabella’s living room and caught sight of Arabella’s guests she was struck dumb and speechless.

 

Her first thought was that Arabella was right to call them foreign.

 

It wasn’t merely in their clothing, not quite muggle but not quite traditional wizard’s robes either, something oriental and exotic yet at the same time like the robes of an auror, designed for wear and combat. All, the children and the adults, wore a headband featuring a metal plate with the intricate design of a leaf carved into the silver.

 

It also wasn’t their features, although they were striking. They had almond shaped eyes and features that were usually found in the east, but only the dark haired boy with dark eyes looked as if he could have been from Japan. The other boy’s blonde hair and blue eyes somehow made him look more alien, with his features, and that wasn’t even getting to the men. The men who did not look as if they were family but both shared silver almost white hair, despite their clear youth, both had tribal red markings on their faces and the smaller man had red eyes.

 

No, the true strangeness of them came in the way they held themselves, the stillness, the sharpness of their eyes, and the solid presence of magic as if with no more than a twitch of their fingers they could send the living room into chaos.

 

And there was Eleanor Lily Potter, James and Lily’s only daughter, as English a girl as there should have been, sitting in the middle of them and looking just as foreign and unfamiliar as the rest.

 

The sight of her though, her hair as wild as James’ but as red as Lily’s and her eyes like her mother’s, brought Minerva back to herself.

 

“Hello, Ellie, I’m professor McGonagall the deputy Headmistress at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Arabella said she told you a bit about the school and about magic.” Minerva started sitting across from the girl.

 

The girl’s eyes darted upwards, and at once Minerva felt ill at ease again, because this was not a look she had ever received from a twelve year old girl before. It had never struck her what a strange and alarming color of eyes Lily had, but they were, both strange and alarming.

 

Ellie Potter had a way of making them burn, making them cold, that Lily never had as if there was no warmth in them at all but only steel.

 

Distantly she heard the blonde boy murmuring to the men, softly and quickly, unfamiliar foreign words that sounded almost like Japanese but not quite.

 

The men simply watched.

 

“You were supposed to get your letter earlier, on your eleventh birthday…” She started but the look in Ellie’s eyes didn’t falter only strengthened and Minerva wondered if it was her imagination making the shadows in the room stretch, “I suppose you must be very curious, perhaps even skeptical, I realize now that your relatives might not have… told you about your parents and where you came from.”

 

She expected something at that, some spark of curiosity, and there was from the blonde whose expression had shifted slightly as he continued to murmur translations to the adults but from the girl there was no hint of interest.

 

One of the men asked Ellie something, the thinner man with the red eyes (as if he was a vampire or had vampire heritage), and Ellie responded something short and terse back before turning to Minerva with a sigh.

 

“The honorable second Shadow of Fire would like to hear more about my parents.” Ellie said, sounding more like a sullen student failing her Transfiguration course than an orphaned girl asking about her mother and father.

 

“The shadow of…” She started and Elle jerked a thumb towards the thinner man, an action which caused him to narrow his eyes somewhat, but he made no audible complaint.

 

“The honorable Tobirama Senju, the second Shadow of Fire.” She repeated, as if this repetition physically pained her, “He’s always had an interest in my clan.”

 

Clan, not family, that made it seem so impersonal as if she wasn’t asking about Lily and James but instead about the noble and ancient house of Potter or even the house of Black. Somehow that tore at Minerva’s heart, to see James and Lily reduced to only their blood.

 

“That’s a long story, Ellie, and one I wish I didn’t have to tell.” Minerva started, knowing that she did because the Dursleys had not told her, had told her some trite story about a muggle car accident as if that could have killed Lily and James, “Before you were born there was a terrible war going on in Britain, against a dark lord, one that we were losing desperately. Your parents were heroes, part of a resistance against him and his followers, and they never gave up hope. They were smart, brave, courageous, and they loved you very much. One night though, October 31 1981, your parents were betrayed by a close friend and the dark lord found their hiding place. He killed them and then he came to kill you, but something very strange happened, the spell that never backfires and never fails, the one we call the killing curse, left only a scar on your forehead and somehow burned his body and destroyed him.” Minerva paused, watching the girl’s expression, and getting a hold of her own thoughts and trying to decide what was important to say now and what later.

 

How to explain to a girl who knew nothing of magic what the killing curse meant, that it never failed, that everyone on the receiving end had always died, and yet somehow miraculously she alone had survived and destroyed the caster.

 

Or how to explain that James and Lily had fought until the very end, that they had found Lily’s body next to the crib, as if she had been standing over it in desperation.

 

“…I don’t think that’s what he meant.” Ellie said uncertainly, her eyes darting back to Tobirama Senju, “I mean, I’m sure he’s very interested in an instant assassination _jutsu_ and my mysterious not dying, but I think he was thinking more blood limits.”

 

Before Minerva could ask what blood limits were, or let her affront and anger over something as petty as blood being brought into this conversation, the other man started speaking, asking Ellie something and motioning for her to translate.

 

“Jiraiya-sensei wants to know why I grew up with my civilian relatives since my parents were _jonin_ war heroes and I clearly had a powerful blood limit.”

 

Civilian, that must be their word for muggle, although it was an odd one to choose and not one Minerva ever would have thought of. Then there were those words blood limit again, one that they clearly did not mean offense by, but seemed to be some concept she’d just never heard of along with that word jonin and jutsu.

 

Suddenly Minerva realized that these were all clearly wizards, powerful wizards at that, but she had yet to see any of them bring out or reach for their wands or any of them make any mention of wands or spells. Instead using strange words she’d never heard of.

 

But she tried not to get caught up in that, in these details, she could ask questions about these people and where Ellie had gone later, “Well, unfortunately, the people your parents had listed as god parents were unable to care for you because of illness, death, and… Anyway, Albus, thought it best that you remain with your muggle relatives for your safety.”

 

The girl didn’t appear to take that answer well, neither did the others, the taller broader man seeming somewhat alarmed by this even and all more or less looking somewhat confused.

 

Finally, the girl said, “That’s it, I can’t do it. I’m done. No more giant _genjutsu_ for me today, thank you very much.”

 

The girl then rapidly started speaking the language the others spoke, and at each syllable their expressions seemed to become caricatures ranging from disbelief to affront, exasperation, anger, and panic.

 

Then there was a great crack and all five of them were gone, as if they’d never been there in the first place, leaving only kneazles in their wake.

 

* * *

 

And in the hokage’s office there was chaos.

 

“Dammit, Lee-chan, you can’t just prematurely pull out of a mission…”

 

“She was getting really personal and creepy with the questions! Didn’t you see that look in her eye, like she knew me, like she wanted something! Besides _England’s_ not even a real place anyway…”

 

“Eru-san, when you’ve been a kage as long as I was you know a genjutsu when you’re in one and that was not a genjutsu.”

 

“Hey, I lived there, trust me it is. It’s the only way to explain half of the weirdness… They wanted to send me to _wizard_ academy!”

 

“Of course they wanted to send you to their shinobi academy, Lee-chan. Granted they may have been idiots to leave you apparently unwatched in the middle of a civilian village but that doesn’t make them complete idiots!”

 

“ _Wizard_ academy, sensei, not shinobi. Believe me, there is a large difference between _wizard_ and shinobi. We don’t wear pointy hats or wave about ninjutsu sticks muttering garbled _Latin_.”

 

“Lee, I don’t think the hats were the point.” Minato pointed out, but was ignored as Jiraiya, Tobirama, and Lee engaged in an epic glaring and shouting match while Minato and Haru stood by the hokage’s desk.

 

“You realize we have to go back now, don’t you?” Jiraiya asked, throwing his hands in the air, the loudest of all three of them by far. The nidaime wasn’t loud when he was angry, he instead was terribly quiet, as if he was holding it all in and on the point of breaking.

 

“The only decent thing to come out of this is that they are fully aware that we can leave at any time. Otherwise we have minimal information on your clan, the English hidden village and academy, the English jutsus and their _wands_ , almost nothing of value except the certainty that we’ll have to go again and speak with this McGonagall Minerva without being certain of her position.”

 

“That could take months! They said the academy lasts seven years! I can’t afford to be out of Konoha for seven years!”

 

“It wouldn’t be seven years!”

 

Then there was shouting about insubordination, docked pay, consequences beyond imagination while Lee stood there two seconds from either disappearing or blowing something up (as she apparently had done as an infant) and just standing there in silence.

 

“So, it went that well.” The hokage said to Minato and Haru.

 

And they just nodded and watched as the chaos unfolded.


	2. Eru Lee's Fantastic Adventures in Flatland

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Team seven, Tobirama, and now Orochimaru make their return to the mysterious land of England and find it even more bizarre and alien than they had previously thought. To the point where they are forced to wonder if Eru Lee wasn't right all along.

“I just want everyone to remember that I said this was a terrible idea multiple times.”

 

Sitting on wooden benches inside of a cell warded with unfamiliar fuinjutsu, having been imprisoned for breaking a law that none of them could truly comprehend and still couldn’t quite piece together, no one was in the mood to listen to Lee’s long since promised ‘I told you so’ rant.

 

Minato knew he wasn’t, at the very least, probably because Lee was just as in the dark as the rest of them on what exactly they’d done to merit imprisonment. Lee wasn’t lecturing because she understood what had gone wrong but instead because she’d been right all along in that something would go wrong.

 

And now she was making sure that they all remembered it.

 

“I told all of you that England made absolutely no sense and was terrible and not one of you believed me. And now we are in a holding cell and I hope all of you are happy.”

 

Minato wasn’t bothering to look at Lee but instead was staring straight across at the forlorn Haru, his arm flung over his eyes, leaning against the wall and looking like he was trying to pretend none of this was happening. Jiraiya, sitting next to Haru, seemed content to keep an idle eye on the English fuinjutsu that was reinforcing the cell but still managed to look bored out of his mind.

 

“Especially you, Jiraiya-sensei, I hope you are the happiest of all of them. Because I told you the most and then you went to the hokage and now we’re stuck in here.”

 

This didn’t even get to the mounting frustration that had begun to resemble killing intent in the nidaime or the death glare of the newest addition to their group, Orochimaru, pointed directly at Lee.

 

And no matter how many times Lee said she’d seen this coming, and that they all should have known better, Minato would still say that none of them could have any idea of what would happen when they returned to England.

 

* * *

 

The story of how Jiraiya, Oro the snake bastard, Tobi the grump, and Jiraiya’s cute little ducklings of students all wound up on the doorstep of the Figg woman, listening as Lee irately pressed the buzzing button on the side of the door over and over, wasn’t that complicated.

 

It really was just an extension of the last aborted mission to England, except this time they decided to nix visiting Lee’s civilian relatives, and go straight to the part where things had gotten interesting.

 

Where words like academy, magic, spells, and witchcraft had all started cropping up. They weren’t the words any reasonable person would use but that could just be the nuances of English. Regardless, given what they’d seen and heard it was very clear that Lee had been dead wrong.

 

There were shinobi in England, there was a hidden village, an academy, and they’d been around for a pretty damn long time.

 

So, like he’d told Lee when she’d prematurely teleported all their asses back to Konoha, it was kind of a given that they’d be headed back.

 

He just didn’t necessarily think they’d bring Oro along. Not that Oro was bad to have along on a mission in unfamiliar territory, one which had gone well enough so far but could still go south, especially given that Lee apparently was from an old an established clan (Jiraiya would eat the hokage’s hat if England didn’t make some sort of move to reclaim her). It was just that… well… Oro wasn’t the most diplomatic of people.

 

Sure, he probably thought he was great at it, but Jiraiya felt that anyone who told war starving orphans to their faces that they were better off dead and abandoned probably shouldn’t be anywhere near a diplomatic mission (or children). It just… it just gave people a very bad impression of Konoha.

 

He would have thought sensei would come to the same conclusion but apparently Oro-bastard had whined enough about unknown jutsus, genetics, blood limits, his expertise on all things genetically Lee, and the need to see these things for himself that the hokage had given him the green light in spite of the fact that they already had the genius nidaime on board.

 

To Jiraiya, and Lee given her giant rants, it seemed like everyone and their brother suddenly wanted to tag along to England.

 

If they’d waited any longer the shodaime himself probably would have wrenched himself away from his second honeymoon to come with and no matter how you played that to a foreign village you couldn’t just expect them to handle two former kages, two sannin, and Eru Lee and not see it as either an invasion or a declaration of war.

 

So there they were, six shinobi, standing on the doorstep of one of the near identical white houses, attracting the stares of every civilian that passed them by, and waiting for something to happen so that they could get back to the point where they left off.

 

That being the awkward translated conversation with McGonagall that he’d had to spend an hour discussing with sensei, the nidaime, and the shodaime to understand just what the hell it had really meant and if she’d even understood what they’d been talking about given that it was Lee translating all of their questions.

 

(He still had no idea if the English actually thought it was a good idea to leave Eru Lee, apparent survivor of an assassination jutsu that blew up an entire building and destroyed what seemed to be the equivalent of an S-ranked missing nin, with her shinobi hating civilian relatives who shoved her into a closet.

 

Because Jiraiya still had no idea how that would make sense to anyone.)

 

They just needed someone to open the door first, “Lee-chan, you sure she’s home?”

 

Lee continued her incessant buzzing, not even looking at him, only tersely responding, “One of the peculiarities of _Little Whinging_ , sensei, is that Figg-san is always home.”

 

“Really, always?” Minato asked with raised eyebrows, looking genuinely curious.

 

“Well, she was when I was around, but that was seven years ago…” Lee trailed off and instead pressed the buzzer with even more insistence.

 

“For god’s sake, the woman clearly isn’t home!” The nidaime spat out, looking irater with every press of the buzzer and Orochimaru looking just as irritated as him but being too proud to blow up at Lee for button.

 

“Seriously, the only time I need crazy Figg-san and she doesn’t even bother to show up.” Lee said giving the buzzer a few last rapid pushes before sighing and letting her hand drop to her side.

 

She turned from the door and gave them all an unimpressed look, the kind she usually reserved for D-ranks, “Was it the cats? Were the nin-cats that interesting? Because I’m pretty sure I can get you some cats if you want, even nin-cats if you really want, we don’t have to go back to…”

 

“It wasn’t the cats.” The nidaime quickly responded, interrupting Lee’s latest rant on why she would go anywhere in the world other than her home country.

 

“Well then it can’t have been Aunt Petunia, right? Surely she wasn’t that interesting, because if you can count on the Dursleys for anything it’s having all the complexity of basic academy clones. Plus, if you’ll remember, she actually threw us out…”

 

“It has nothing to do with your civilian relatives.” The nidaime interjected, and strangely enough this was true, because while they were blood relatives of Lee they were also clearly civilians and more than that… It had offered a little too much insight into exactly why Lee was the way she was than Jiraiya was necessarily comfortable with.

 

All shinobi had their eccentricities, powerful shinobi most of all, but look at those too closely and you could see the battlefield stretching behind every one. Shinobi lived with a kind of forced desperation or else they became hard, brittle, and stoic; it was how you lived with yourself and the world.

 

It was how you lived with Ame.

 

He hadn’t realized that Lee’s… Lee-ness wasn’t so different than the coping habits of any other ninja.

 

“This place continues to be the worst.” Lee finally concluded and then sighed once again, her shoulders slumping forward, “Looks like we’re going to have to try something else… Or you know, go home.”

 

“Why would I have come all the way here using your ungodly teleportation method only to turn straight back to Konoha?” Orochimaru asked, golden eyes narrowed at Jiraiya’s kunoichi genin, Minato and Haru inching slowly away from Lee so as not to also incur the snake sage’s wrath.

 

“Is this one of those questions I’m not actually supposed to answer?” And once again Lee proved to have both no sense of self preservation and no ability to process rhetorical questions.

 

“How familiar are you with the area, Eru-chan?” The nidaime asked before Orochimaru could try to feed Lee to Manda, although Manda was looking pretty well fed ever since Lee and Oro had turned his lab into a clone slaughterhouse, and god if that place didn’t give Jiraiya nightmares.

 

“I grew up here, didn’t I?”

 

“You don’t think it’s changed in the last seven years? The location of the villages?” He pressed and Lee looked thoughtful at this, her eyes roving their surroundings, the green patches of grass and the black river of stone that served as the road.

 

“ _Little Whinging_ remains hopelessly dull and stagnant so I doubt it.”

 

“McGonagall-san mentioned a government council for their shinobi, the _ministry of magic_ I believe she called it, do you have any idea what village it would be located in?”

 

Lee’s eyes raised dubiously at the question but she responded promptly enough, “As far as I know there isn’t a _ministry of magic_ but then every _ministry_ I know of, and the _prime minister_ himself, would be in _London_ , probably near _Westminster_.”

 

“That’s fine.” The nidaime said adding, “Get us in the area and I should be able to sense the chakra signatures of any nearby shinobi.”

 

For a moment Lee just stared at them dully and then said in a slow drawl that questioned all of their combined judgement, “You know, I’ve never actually been to _London_ before. If I try to teleport there, well, it might get a little bumpy.”

 

“Then we’ll walk.” Orochimaru cut in, a little too eagerly, Lee’s teleportation jutsu wasn’t for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach as Jiraiya had found out during their last trip to England. Besides, walking or running to villages through the countryside and on roads was familiar territory, it was what most missions consisted of really.

 

But Lee shook her head, “If anything we’d drive in, take the bus, or the commuter rail in. You don’t just walk to _London_ from _Surrey_. Besides, I didn’t say I couldn’t do it. I know what London looks like and I can probably get us near _Buckingham Palace_ , or _Big Ben_ if you really want to be close to _Westminster_ , but it might be a bit… bumpy.”

 

“You mean… bumpier than it usually is?” Minato asked, probably the most familiar out of all of them with Lee’s method of teleportation.

 

“I’m sure it will be fine.” Lee offered with a small shrug.

 

As she grabbed all of them in an impromptu group hug and reality hurdled away, replaced by nausea, extreme disorientation, and this hot cold sweaty feeling that you only got when you’d been hit by a Suna nin’s poisoned kunai, Jiraiya felt that ‘bumpy’ was a bit of an understatement.

 

Poor Haru, the most noble and normal of all of his students, as soon as they landed he very publicly lost his breakfast right in front of the gilded golden gates and what looked like a hundred gawking civilians all flashing bright white lights from black little boxes.

 

And as usual, Lee had no sympathy or tact about it, “ _Jesus Christ_ , Dead Last, I know you’re the worst out of all of us but you could try not to show it at every opportunity?”

 

“Right, Lee… I’ll try.” Haru murmured out, managing only to look slightly less green as his face paled to a sickly if somewhat healthier yellow.

 

Not that Minato was looking much better, hunched into a ball on the ground, or Jiraiya was feeling that much better. He felt like he’d just been crushed by Tsunade after a productive day of research and then been shoved into a blender.

 

“What is this place?” It was the nidaime’s voice somewhere over to Jiraiya’s left. The man was trying to stand but was spending most of his energy looking off in the opposite direction of the gilded gates.

 

Jiraiya forced himself to turn and look with him and when he did he saw exactly what Tobirama Senju meant.

 

And even more than Surrey which had already seemed strange and alien he felt as if he was in a whole different world.

 

* * *

 

“Well, _Pho_ is kind of ramen-esq, isn’t it?”

 

Lee turned to her stunned companions, all still gawking at the traffic, the traffic lights, the street lamps, the buildings, the double decker buses, the underground entrances, the posters, the neon signs, the advertisements, the swarming civilians, and looking all around like a bunch of loonies who got lost and separated from their traveling oriental circus.

 

The sad part was that the lost bit was actually true.

 

When it became clear, at Buckingham Palace with Dead Last upchucking in front of the queen’s residence, that Lee would be the one in charge of actually getting them places she’d tried to get them out as quickly as possible while also disposing of the gawking tourist civilian’s incriminating camera footage by setting everything on fire.

 

(Because she’d abruptly realized that nobody had any idea that the disposable Kodak cameras pointed at their faces and flashing at intermittent intervals were actually cameras. Cameras in Konoha were giant dark cloth covered things that were really only used for official purposes like your identification photo. And if they had realized then probably everyone wouldn’t want England’s first impression of Konoha shinobi to be Dead Last defacing Buckingham Palace.

 

Actually, they probably wouldn’t want photographs period, ninja were very paranoid about that sort of thing.)

 

The point was she’d tried to head towards the Thames, got a little bit lost, and had somehow wound up in a vaguely Konoha-esq looking street featuring Vietnamese food which in their current circumstances she would settle for in place of ramen.

 

That was a fine enough plan, Lee could handle lunch even if Dead Last couldn’t in front of bloody Buckingham Palace.

 

The real trouble was that none of them seemed to notice that they’d gotten very off-course and were nowhere near Westminster. They were all still just… struck dumb. The nidaime, Orochimaru, Jiraiya, Dead Last, and even Minato had spent the past half hour gaping at everything and flinching every time someone pointed at them or someone honked their horn. And then there was the nidaime who continually muttered things about wiring, electricity, the design of the towers, and all the materials and money that were just inconceivable that would be needed to build a village like this one. Even Orochimaru, who prided himself on being too cool and evil for everything, was silently dumbfounded and had to be tugged away from various window displays and the sheer amount of glass that was everywhere.

 

(“How in the hell does the _English_ daimyo afford all of this?!” Orochimaru asked when Lee tried to drag him away from his most recent staring contest with his own reflection in a window display.

 

It’d be more understandable if they were in a better part of town and not in an alley that was frankly quite seedy and Lee probably would feel uncomfortable in if she hadn’t been trained from the age of six to kill people.

 

“Well, I don’t think the _prime minister_ paid for the _erotic bakery’s_ window display.” Lee said but unfortunately that was when Jiraiya somehow figured out what the store was actually selling.

 

“Lee-chan, you didn’t tell me that the _English_ turned food into porn! I didn’t even know you could do that. Why didn’t I know you could do that? This is like, everything I’ve ever dreamed of, food and beautiful women combined into the same thing! My god, they’re geniuses, we need one in Konoha!”

 

And then it took Minato, Lee, and Dead Last combined to drag them all away from the display before their sensei was arrested for public perversion in a foreign country with Orochimaru as his terrifying serial killer accomplice.)

 

“Yeah, I’ll take the _pho_.” Lee stepped inside the small shop, motioning for a table for six, breathing a sigh in relief when all they got was a few raised eyebrows and a table in the back.

 

When the tea arrived and their orders had been placed, Lee just ordering noodles for everyone to speed things along, she cut right to the chase looking at the nidaime, “So, any ninja around, or you know overwhelmingly large governmental chakra signatures?”

 

Lee still had her doubts, no matter what McGonagall or crazy Mrs. Figg had said the last time, but at this point she was willing to take anything that would get them all out of here and home that much faster.

 

The nidaime didn’t answer for a moment, instead took the tea looking more dazed than Lee had ever seen him, his red eyes strangely unfocused. Mechanically he took a drink before asking almost hesitantly, “How old is this village, Eru-chan?”

 

“Not to side track you, nidaime-sama, but chakra first then history later.” Lee said, and that earned her a brief look of irritation.

 

“There are… veins of chakra throughout the village, most likely laced in various seals, and a large concentration in the distance but nothing significantly close to our location. My guess is that there is a hidden village inside of this… village.” He grimaced, visibly trying to fit the concept of a village hidden in a village inside his head, and then gave her a significant look, “Now, _London_.”

 

“Well, it depends on what you mean. If I’m remembering right _London_ was actually a village started by the _Romans_ when they colonized _Britain_. If that’s the case then it’s well over a thousand years old, probably close to two thousand actually.”

 

“Over a thousand years old?!” Orochimaru seemed to be safely over his stunned disbelief as his features morphed into one of disdain and smug superiority, “No village could possibly be as old as that! No country is as old as that!”

 

“I suppose, I mean, it depends what you mean by country. But _London_ has been around for a very long time, even if it was burned to the ground a few times.” Lee shrugged, because statehood was a funny thing like that in Europe. There were sort of countries back when the Normans had invaded but it was all very fuzzy and the idea was more that you had fealty to a lord than a king. She wasn’t sure when the idea of Britain, with definite borders and a single overruling king, came into play but it’d taken a long time to get to that point.

 

“You must be exaggerating, the sage of the six paths himself was only alive five hundred years ago.” Orochimaru insisted with that rather familiar sneer of his, Orochimaru really made contemptuous expressions an art form, “Considering how old you were at the time and your current ability to interpret any simple fact I highly doubt you’re correct.”  

 

“No, the _Normans_ invaded in 1066 and that was about a thousand years after the _Romans_ had come in.” Lee said and only then realized that her words seemed to have broken everyone but Orochimaru who was still seething.

 

“Lee-chan, what year is it now, here I mean, with _England’s_ calendar?” Jiraiya asked, but in that way that made it seem like he was dreading the answer.

 

“1993, I think?” Considering Lee was getting close to thirteen it was probably around that time, unless time got really whacky in Konoha when she wasn’t looking.

 

“Holy shit.” Jiraiya said, looking somewhat dazed, before waving his hands and attempting to explain it away, “No way, I actually have to side with Oro-teme on this one. That’s just… That’s not possible. I mean, everything was too war-torn before the sage arrived, this kind of infrastructure just couldn’t hold for two thousand years.”

 

Lee grimaced at that, “Well, about that… I don’t think he swung by _England_.”

 

“What do you mean he didn’t swing by _England_?! The sage of the six paths was the one who introduced chakra molding and the basis of ninjutsu. Without him there wouldn’t be any shinobi here or whatever they call themselves.”

 

Lee had sort of gotten into the history of England and the world with Minato, and the non-existence of England in it, but she hadn’t really with anyone else and she wasn’t even really sure Minato understood. Most people, if they thought about England at all, just thought it was an island in the middle of nowhere. Like if you went further off the coast, past wave, past the edge the map, you would find it somewhere out there all by itself.

 

She hadn’t really bothered to correct anybody, because who really cared about England? Plus it’d seemed like a hassle to explain people who barely took her seriously about anything.

 

“I mean he didn’t swing by _England_ … Or if he did, he did it two thousand years ago as a carpenter, but even then I’d hardly call Jesus a ninja.” Lee held up her hands in defense before one of them could ask how that was possible and she had to get into the fact that there weren’t really any unknown spots on the globe and as far as everyone in the world knew the elemental nations didn’t exist, “But hey, this is all highly irrelevant, we should focus instead on chakra and those crazy _English_ shinobi who want to invite me to their academy.”

 

“Lee… Where is… Where is _England_ , exactly?” And Minato asked the question she really hoped he wasn’t going to ask, the one he’d been putting the pieces together for over the seven years they’d known each other.

 

Well, she’d tried before, but no one had really understood it. England, the world, was like a layer of a grand genjutsu and when you peeled it away Konoha apparently resided beneath, but that too was only its own layer.

 

(It was like Flatland, residents of Flatland in their two dimensional world simply couldn’t comprehend the three dimensional world, not if they’d never heard of it or thought of it. To them their world, their two dimensions, was all there really was all they’d ever really considered. They had their flat wars, their flat losses, their flat victories, and they didn’t really have time or the need to consider anything else.

 

Then one day a three dimensional being somehow gets stuck in Flatland in two dimensions. The being said then, “I come from up.” But the problem is that there isn’t a direction up or down, only flat two dimensional directions. So nobody really understands the explanation, so the three dimensional being turned two dimensional tries to simplify it a bit and say that this idea of flatness is all an illusion, a genjutsu. A very clever convincing one but an illusion none the less.

 

But this fails to be convincing and at this point the three dimensional being more or less gives up because the third dimension sucked anyway and the two dimensional Flatland was far more exciting.)

 

Needless to say it was the kind of conversation she’d have alone with Minato back in Konoha when they weren’t sitting in England where literally anything could and would happen. Because England was secretly awful.

 

“Oh, well, you know it’s an island across from _France_ … But we should really focus on Figg-san and McGonagall and their conspiracy involving a herd of nin-cats.”

 

None of them seemed willing to buy that distraction, or even eat their noodles as Lee dug into hers (wishing all the while that it was ramen and they’d never come to England), because now she’d have to explain (again) that England was fake and no one would believe her (again).

 

It was like the first trip to England all over again, well less weirdly personal and emotional, but still…

 

What she needed was to distract them, give them what they thought they wanted, and then convince them that they might as well call it quits and go home.

 

It was then that Lee had an idea, one that wasn’t necessarily brilliant, but was better than explaining two thousand plus years of history, “Hey, you guys, in the spirit of sages and prophets and really old ninjutsu that predates the sage I know about this really old… _Jewish_ suiton jutsu that lets you part the red sea… Supposedly really impressive.”

 

“I thought you said there weren’t any shinobi in…” Dead Last started but Lee cut him off before he could finish that damning sentence.

 

“In _England_ , Moses was in _Egypt_ at the time. And he was a badass.” If Lee thought about Moses, not in the context of being dragged to church by the Dursleys, but instead as an ancient Jewish shinobi then he really was quite the ninjutsu master and probably could wipe the floor with anyone alive today.

 

And they all just stared at her, blinking, or glaring.

 

“…What does this have to do with anything?” The nidaime asked.

 

“Well, part of the reason we came was for ninjutsu techniques… If we can’t find any shinobi or the hidden village then the least we can do is test out some of the publicly known ones. We can part the _Thames_ while we’re in _London_ , then maybe move on to the _channel._ ” And maybe then they’d finally be satisfied and they could all go home instead of wandering around England and asking Lee uncomfortable questions about history whose answers they weren’t even willing to believe.

Really, why ask if you weren’t even willing to contemplate the answers?

 

“… Why not, Lee-chan? Go knock yourself out.”

 

* * *

 

“Sensei, I think Lee is a little…” Minato didn’t finish the sentence, just watched as Lee created a great wooden staff from nothingness, holding it above her head as she walked on a small concrete ledge by the great river that ran through the city.

 

Off, was what he wanted to say, Lee was a little off. Of course, sensei might not realize the difference, Haru didn’t appear to or the nidaime or Orochimaru for that matter. Maybe only Minato was close enough to see the difference between how Lee usually was and what she was like in England.

 

Lee was always so self-assured, so certain, like she knew she could more than handle anything the world threw at her. In England she looked like she was anticipating their impending doom and trying to just convince them to get out as quickly as possible.

 

That’s what the jutsu really was about, or whatever it was Lee was planning to do, because if she really thought about it then she’d know that her demonstrating a jutsu meant nothing. Lee didn’t need hand seals, had overwhelming amounts of chakra, and invented ninjutsu techniques on an almost daily basis.

 

Just because Lee could part a river or even an ocean didn’t mean anyone else necessarily could.

 

“Eh, let her get it out of her system.” Jiraiya said with a shrug, “Besides, I think we all could use a little bit of time to let everything… sink in. God, we haven’t even gotten to their hidden village yet.”

 

“Isn’t it kind of odd that we haven’t actually run into a shinobi yet? If there really is a village inside this village then shouldn’t they be out here too?” Haru asked, looking around at those walking by, none of them walking with a shinobi’s fast and guarded gait.

 

“Good question, Haru-kun, got to say I really don’t know though. Maybe it’s odd, but maybe not, this place is so different already.” Jiraiya trailed off, looking down the river towards several great bridges, some rather elaborate just as the palace they saw when they first arrived had been.

 

“No, it’s one I’d ask as well… There are threads of chakra everywhere in this city, like veins leading out from a heart. Yet, everyone we’ve met so far has below genin level chakra reserves…” The nidaime said, red eyes drifting over their surroundings, settling on buldings, wires, lights and flicking through all the people who walked past.

 

“Perhaps they take separation from their civilian population to extremes. The outer village for the civilians and the inner for the shinobi themselves.” Orochimaru offered, unsaid was the idea that in an attack this civilian ring would serve as a buffer. Minato didn’t flinch at these unspoken words but he paled a bit wondering if England was less like Konoha and more like Iwa or Kumo.

 

He hadn’t thought so, not the way McGonagall, a sensei at the English academy, talked to Lee and talked to Figg-san. There hadn’t been any sign of animosity against civilians, against foreign ninja, but all the same… All the same that had just been one short conversation in one home.

 

“But they would still travel through that outer rim, even with transportation jutsus such as hiraishin or the body flicker. It’s an unbelievably large village, it’s conceivable we could have simply missed someone in this section, but all the same there should be more of a presence out here… We shouldn’t have to travel into the heart of the village to find shinobi.” For a while no one said anything, just looked at the surrounding unfamiliar village, one that seemed impossibly large

 

“So, then, are we missing something? They must have had some reason to organize the village this way, right?” Haru asked but nobody answered him, they just pondered in silence, letting that question sink in and fester along with all of the other information that Lee had given them.

 

Meanwhile Lee still stood on the ledge, her staff aloft and a single streak of yellow light fell through the clouds. For a moment she was wrapped in golden light, looking like something divine and otherworldly, and then with great force she stuck her staff into the river and abruptly the water fled from it, forming two great towers on the side and leaving a clear path of river mud at the bottom.

 

“Wow, that’s actually damn impressive… Hey, nidaime-sama, can you do that?” Jiraiya asked, turning to the nidaime.

 

“… I’ve never tried.” The man said reluctantly, staring down at Lee with raised eyebrows, which probably meant that he couldn’t or it would take a lot more effort on his own end.

 

“Nice job, Lee!” Minato shouted down to her, watching as she turned back to grin and wave, looking for a moment like she would any other day of the week in Konoha.

 

“It’d be more impressive with the _channel_ but this works too.” Lee called back up, seemingly unconcerned by the rising pillars of water, or the stares they were all getting and the startled English cries from the civilians around them.

 

“…How can she just do that with no effort and I still can’t do the tree exercise?” Haru asked, although whether he was asking god or Jiaraiya was anyone’s guess.

 

“Well, life’s hard, squirt.” Was Jiraiya’s rather lame explanation and earned a glare from Haru.

 

They stood there for a few moments, watching as Lee floated her way onto the side of the road where they were standing, her clothes and hair floating around her as if gravity had lessened itself and only reasserted when her feet touched the ground.

 

“So, now that you’ve seen some almost _English_ jutsus I guess we’re ready to call it a day, right?” Lee said, offering a grin to everyone, as she caused the staff to disappear from whence it came.

 

“Is that how you thought this was going to work out?” Jiraiya asked and whatever light-heartedness Lee had had in the past ten minutes disappeared.

She sighed, rubbed her temples and closed her eyes, and in a very impatient tone said, “Look, Jiraiya-sensei, I know you think this place is really cool but trust me… Something is going to go wrong. It’s best to cut our losses and get out while the going is good before anything weird and surreal happens, trust me on this, _England_ is terrible.”

 

“Why don’t you be a good obedient genin and put the river back where you found it?” Orochimaru said before adding, “It’s actually somewhat sad that some of your brainwashed clones are more tolerable than you are.”

 

The towers of water shuddered for a moment as Lee’s expression darkened and then fell apart in great chunks and settled back into its usual flow and rhythm, “Why is it that nobody ever listens to anything I say? And which clone? You feed half of them to your giant snake! You’re not talking about Emotional Support Lee, are you?”

 

Minato, instead of looking at Lee and Orochimaru bicker (an almost daily occurrence), instead turned to face the civilians who were looking at Lee and pointing. Pointing and saying words that Lee had told him, but that were too fast and out of context for him to really catch, something about magic and miracles and tricks and…

 

Like they’d never seen ninjutsu before in their lives.

 

There was some nagging realization in his head, something just out of his reach, but whatever it was sent waves of dread through him as he realized that they had miscalculated something. He just had no idea what it was, just that it involved civilians and ninjutsu.

 

“No, I am not talking about… Your Lab Assistant Lee is tolerable.”

 

“Lab Assistant Lee? She doesn’t even do anything! She just writes your stupid notes and does stupid measurements for you.” Lee balked, her hands flailing about as they usually did when she was getting overemotional.

 

“And that’s why she’s the most tolerable.”

 

Lee said nothing for a moment and then blurted, “… And that’s why you have no friends!”

 

“That fails to make any sense at all.” Orochimaru replied blandly.

 

“Oh, but it does! See, you just want to hang out in your lab all day feeding clones to your snake and cutting people open. You’re like this evil scientist hermit who has to be dragged out for drinks by your weird perverted best friend who will probably spend the whole night trying to get laid.” Lee was grinning again, her sharp aggressive grin, the kind that was meant to cut into the one facing it.

 

“…I’m the weird perverted best friend?” Jiraiya asked, looking kind of stunned, before adding, “Can we at least just call me the super pervert best friend?”

 

But both Orochimaru and Lee stoutly ignored him.

 

“And what does that have to do with anything?”

 

“… That’s not the point!”

 

And that was when the English shinobi arrived.

 

* * *

 

They all sat more or less despondent inside the cell and stared out beyond the bars to the rest of the building. Waiting for Jiraiya, the nidaime, or even Orochimaru to come to some sort of consensus about where to go from here.

 

Because Lee had told them, when they’d first been confronted by the glowing ninjutsu sticks (glowing strange colors that chakra just didn’t make), and she’d readied herself for a fight she had reminded them that they could leave at any time.

 

All they needed was to tell her when and they were gone.

 

But they’d waited, allowed themselves to be ushered through the streets (not teleported though the English shinobi had tried), and finally into this holding cell and now…

 

“Alright, Minato-kun, run this by me again, what law exactly did they say we broke?” Jiraiya asked, rubbing at his face wearily.

 

“Something called the _statute of secrecy_ … law of secrecy. Basically, they said you can’t perform jutsus in front of civilians. Or at least… That’s what it sounded like.” Minato said, and that was basically what they had said (in disbelief that Minato and Lee hadn’t been familiar with the idea), but they hadn’t explained the numerous civilians inside of the hidden portion of the village, behind the fuinjutsu wards in the stone walls, who clearly were witnessing jutsus left and right.

 

The ones who had confronted them, yes they were certainly shinobi (although their crimson uniforms practically painted targets on their backs), but everyone else… Everyone else was what Minato would label as a civilian.

 

“I told you _England_ makes absolutely no sense.” Lee interjected earning a glare from everyone else in the cell.

 

Plus, if those people really weren’t civilians, then how could the hidden village even survive without them? Most of what ninja did was for civilians, everything else for the village itself, without those civilian based missions everything would be... Well, missions of dire importance to the village.

 

And a hidden village simply couldn’t be self-sustainable like that.

 

“What about Lee-chan’s old neighbor, Figg-san, McGonagall-san used quite a few jutsus with her around.” Jiraiya said, rubbing at his face, “And she was definitely a civilian…. Even with all those nin-cats.”

 

“Well, I…” Minato started then trailed off because he didn’t know, he couldn’t tell what the difference was.

 

“…Maybe there isn’t really a law. Maybe they just made up a reason to get us in here. Maybe they just want Lee and her crazy jutsus back.” Haru said, his eyes on Lee, and Minato turned to look at her too eyes widening in realization because that made a lot of sense.

 

If they wanted Lee, if they wanted as little resistance as possible, then throwing them off balance and locking them behind fuinjutsu wards like this might be the best way to go about it. By distracting Jiraiya, the nidaime, and Orochimaru with the situation and unfamiliar opposition it might be the best time to reclaim Lee and her bloodline.

 

But then why not make up some law that made a little more sense?

 

“Then why haven’t they tried to separate us yet?” Lee asked, her eyes narrowed, exuding that dangerous edge barely hidden by her casual posture, “They’ve had plenty of time already. And besides, they should know that it would take more than they are willing to give to get me to stay in this place.”

 

And that was why they’d stayed in the cell so far, waiting for whatever happened with this, waiting to see what these shinobi had to offer and what Konoha should think of them. Would they be like Suna, reluctant allies at best, the fallen Uzushio which had been a sister village in all but name, or irrevocable enemies like Iwa?

 

Footsteps sounded, all six looked over to see one of the shinobi who had originally taken them to the cell followed by none other than a relieved, exasperated, and panicked McGonagall Minerva, “ _Eleanor Lily Potter! I swear, even if you look exactly like Lily, you are James through and through! Only your father could inflict this kind of madness in one morning._ ”

 

Lee just blink, hopped off the bench and brushed off her clothes, “Oh, looks like our bail just got paid.”

 

* * *

 

It was by luck that Minerva found out that Eleanor Potter was once again in England with her strange companions. Extreme luck, really. All just from light hearted conversation with Nymphadora Tonks as she was passing through Diagon Alley as she mentioned a group of six foreign troublemakers who had broken the statute of secrecy and then some.

 

Honestly, parting a major river and blowing up muggle cameras left and right, then going so far as to resist arrest and refuse to be apparated, walking through the streets of muggle London in full wizarding attire. The missed coordinates of apparition were understandable (happened quite frequently to be honest) but the rest was absurd, and something James would have found hilarious she was sure.

 

Of course, as they were foreign and it was an apparent first offense they’d just get off with a hefty fine and a hefty warning but still…

 

Six overly powerful wizards who for whatever reason didn’t carry wands, three children, one a little girl with red hair and green eyes, as well as three adult men, two with white hair and strange markings on their faces.

 

And just like that Minerva found herself rushing to the temporary holding cells in the ministry, sending a frantic patronus to Albus (not making that mistake twice), forsaking her trip to Gringotts for the day, and bullying her way through to find Eleanor Potter and her rather familiar companions behind the bars of a jail cell.

 

A bit of haggling and intimidating former students later and Minerva and the six strangers were walking out into Diagon Alley. They looked… well, she wasn’t sure, it wasn’t the awed wonder of muggleborn students or the apprehension of the muggle parents but it wasn’t the matter of fact taken for granted look of purebloods either.

 

The man with white hair and red eyes, the second Shadow of Fire Minerva believed Ellie had called him, was looking at everything with raised eyebrows as if he wasn’t quite sure what to think of it but also wasn’t quite sure he approved.

 

The other man she’d met before, the larger man with white hair and red tribal markings, also looked as if he was trying and failing to make sense of everything and was settling for being slightly uncomfortable. Every once in a while he’d mutter something in that foreign language to either the dark haired man or the Shadow of Fire and only receive glares of irritation back.

 

And that new dark haired man with the purple marks on his face… It was a terrible comparison to make, and one she wasn’t sure why she was making because merlin knew he looked nothing like… But some part of her shivered when she stared at him and those cold golden serpentine eyes and another part of her remembered the dark lord.

 

Minerva tried to put that out of her head, the shadow of the dark lord was still a terrible thing more than ten years after the fact, and instead focused on something she had overwhelming familiarity with, namely cleaning up a Potter’s latest mess.

 

And honestly, it was a bit relieving, she’d seemed nothing like her mother and father in that last meeting so to know that there was something of her parents still in her… It was good to know that James and Lily could at least live through her.

 

So Minerva pulled on the girl’s ear, making a silent decision to drag them all to the Leaky Cauldron, sit them down, and get to the bottom of everything. The girl hopped along looking balefully up at her but didn’t offer any protestations while the blonde boy speedily kept pace with them looking at the girl with concern.

 

“Honestly, what were you thinking, breaking the statute of secrecy? And in such a blatant ridiculous manner! I’ve never heard of such a thing, parting the Thames…” Minerva shook her head, she honestly wouldn’t have believed it was possible, not from a girl her age.

 

“Moses did it.” Ellie said, imitating James when he was sulking and caught red-handed to a tee.

 

“Don’t think you can get out of it with that excuse, lass! You can’t just go using magic against muggles, it’s a very serious law! They were lenient on you because you’re young and foreign but if you get three offenses they’ll snap your…” Minerva trailed off, all sense of familiarity bleeding away, as she realized that Eleanor Lily Potter did not have a wand. That none of these men following behind her, looking at the windows and the shops, at the witches and wizards appeared to have wands.

 

(But how in the world was that possible? Every magical civilization used wands? True, there were some who had once been runic based but those had faded over the ages and… Every modern magical society made use of the wand.)

 

“That’s right, you don’t have a wand, do you Ellie?”

 

“Nope, I don’t even need to use hand seals.” Eleanor said with a bright grin and added almost conspiratorially, “I am the goddess of _chakra_ manipulation.”

 

“What is a muggle, exactly?” A soft, unfamiliarly accented, voice asked.

 

She looked over to find the blonde boy staring back with a very intent look, she wouldn’t have thought possible in a boy his age, just as Ellie often looked at her in a way that no child should be capable of. His eyes were the sort of blue that could range between a soft summer sky and jagged broken ice in the depths of winter.

 

“Oh, right, did I not explain that last time? I’m sorry, I think I forgot to ask your name before you disapparated without warning.” Minerva offered weakly, and really, it had been in the middle of the meeting without any warning at all. Minerva wasn’t even sure she’d made it through all of the necessary information about Hogwarts because of it, or through all of Ellie’s own personal history…

 

She hadn’t even gotten around to asking Eleanor to attend, telling her about her family’s legacy, how they would have wanted her to attend the school even if she did have to start a few years later than she should have.

 

“Minato Namikaze.” The boy said and then proceeded to point to the others behind them, “And over there is Haru Matsuda, our _genin_ teammate, Jiraiya our _sensei_ , Tobirama Senju the second Shadow of Fire, and Orochimaru who was Jiraiya’s teammate and part of the legendary three.”

 

And again there were those foreign words, ones she didn’t know and couldn’t place, sensei seemed obvious but words like genin were not so easily explained.

 

After they had left the first time she had done a bit of research into the magical east, into their own academies and schools, but somehow they had not seemed half so foreign as these men from the Village Hidden in the Leaves.

 

Everywhere from London to Tokyo they used wands, learned spells, went to magical schools, and specialized in known familiar arts. Perhaps some things were taught differently, perhaps there were different cultural specialties, but… but they had all used wands and spells.

 

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Namikaze.” She said before adding, “As for your question… I’m sure you have your own word for them in your language but a muggle is someone who doesn’t have any magic.”

 

The boy stared at her again for a few moments, his brow furrowed in confusion, and slowly he said, “They must have some _chakra_ , everybody, even civilians have _chakra_.”

 

There, at least, was a word she could easily place. Chakra must be their word for magic and again that word civilian for muggle.

 

“Well, that’s been a subject of controversy for millennia, and one whose definite answer still isn’t known. Perhaps muggles do have magic but simply can’t access it, perhaps they have none, or perhaps they simply don’t have a large enough magical core. Regardless, for whatever reason, muggles can’t use magic like we can.” She watched to see how he’d react to this, disagree vehemently like a pureblood, or else become offended as some muggleborns did, but the boy’s face was almost impossible to read instead there was only that look of calculation.

 

Of thoughts whirring and being placed together to form a more complete picture.

 

“So then, you can be a civilian without being a muggle.” The boy summarized uncertainly.

 

“I… I suppose, it depends what you mean by civilian.”

 

The boy looked at Ellie in desperation, silently conveying that she should ask for the necessary clarification. The girl looked around them and began pointing at people scurrying through the streets, “Well, someone like her, or him, or that man selling the books, or that baker over there… People who aren’t _shinobi_ and don’t use _jutsus_ … Nope, Minato, I’m confused by this too. I think we should just settle with muggles equaling civilians.”

 

“But that’s not…” The boy switched to the other language, his native language, and then Ellie and him proceeded to bicker pointing at this person and that person and herself quite a few times. They didn’t even stop when they’d reached the Leaky Cauldron and Minerva had herded the whole group into a table in the back all while the patrons watched and once the children started the adults started getting into it too, everyone cutting over the other, and Jiraiya bellowing over all of them.

 

And every once in a while she would catch those somewhat familiar words, chakra, jutsus, and shinobi but everything else flew past just that it had something to do with muggles and whatever they called civilians.

 

Then suddenly, Ellie was speaking in English again, “Also, just, while we’re on the subject of who’s actually a _shinobi_ , is Mrs. Figg an infiltration specialist?”

 

“What, Arabella?” Minerva asked, her mind scrambling for some foothold, before she flushed realizing what Ellie must have meant. And this was a conversation she had hoped to avoid, would avoid with any English speaking student and her family, but it struck her that Ellie Potter really had no idea and was getting the very wrong impression (going so far as to think Arabella was a spy of all things), “No, Arabella is… Well, I don’t like to tell other people for her. Well, Arabella is a squib.”

 

“A squib.” Ellie repeated dully, her eyebrows raising, looking highly unamused with this new word.

 

“A squib is… Well, sometimes when wizards and witches have children, the child doesn’t always have magic. When this happens that child is called a squib. Of course, there’s nothing shameful in being a squib…”

 

“So they’re muggles.” Ellie cut in before Minerva could try to explain the intricacies.

 

“What? No, no they understand the wizarding world and were born in it…”

 

“Oh, so muggles are civilians born and living outside of the village while squibs are civilians inside of it!” The blonde boy exclaimed looking very proud at having made this connection until Ellie turned to him and dully said, “Minato, Mrs. Figg lived in Little Whinging, not the Village Hidden in London.”

 

Minato’s face fell and his cheeks became pink with embarrassment and he rubbed the back of hair while muttering excuses in his native tongue.

 

“I think we’ll just settle with muggles being equivalent to civilians.” Ellie finally said before sighing, “So, Professor McGonagall, here we are, again. You were talking about the academy as well as my clan last time we met, also about that one time I blew up an S-ranked missing _nin_ as an infant.”

 

“Right, well, yes… Yes, let me see…” Minerva started, trying to think, but as she did the worst thing that could happen in that moment did.

 

It had been a wonder no one had asked so far, that no one had pointed and looked and put two and two together, because the girl looked so much like her mother and her father. Perhaps it was her intimidating companions, perhaps it was her own foreign clothing, and her tendency to slip into a foreign language.

 

But Tom, who had brought over several pints of butter-beer from the bar, finally got a good look at her and in too loud of a voice exclaimed, “Blimey, it’s Eleanor Potter!”

 

* * *

 

“Holy shit, they think she’s a god.”

 

It was Jiraiya’s genin, the one Tobirama was the least familiar with, who came to this conclusion. And the sad thing was that Tobirama couldn’t find evidence that he was wrong. When the bartender had recognized Eru, had called her by her longer foreign name, every eye in the room had turned to them.

 

And suddenly there were people sobbing, people crowding around to touch her, grasp her hands and shake them rapidly, some even reaching to pull off her headband or else to stroke it, looking at her in a way that people might look at the sage of the six paths himself. This went beyond adoration and respect for a kage, for even Hashirama himself, this was…

 

A sort of madness.

 

“No, no… They just… Uh… Minato, can you ask McGonagall-san to kindly explain what the hell is going on?”

 

Minato was just staring open mouthed, listening to the words these people were saying, that McGonagall was saying to tell them to back off and give Eru some space.

 

“They think Lee, Eru Lee, is a god.” Haru repeated, with the stunned look of someone who had been struck on the head, Tobirama was feeling quite similar.

 

“Surely no fool would mistake Eru Lee for a benign god.” Orochimaru muttered, and again Tobirama couldn’t bring himself to contest this either, because Lee while capable of raising the dead was neither good nor evil but instead some strange ineffable thing in between.

 

Eru Lee, herself, was looking increasingly panicked, as any shinobi would with their hands occupied for too long of a time. Her eyes kept darting towards them and Tobirama as if asking permission for what she hadn’t bothered to last time.

 

If this was the time to pull out and return to Konoha.

 

And honestly, he didn’t really know, was beginning to feel on edge himself because he truly didn’t. No one here had the chakra reserves capable of matching their party, only McGonagall Minerva was close with a specialized jonin’s reservoirs or that of an exemplary chunin, and none seemed suited for combat.

 

Even their brief altercation with the shinobi at the river had amounted to nothing, taijutsu alone was enough to avoid their linear ninjutsu attacks as well as their pitiful attempts to grab them physically, they had been slow and unpracticed and more relied almost solely on the slim wooden sticks through which they channeled their chakra and performed jutsus.

 

Their reliance was such that the chakra of everyone in this country, everyone within the hidden village, seemed to gravitate towards whichever arm they used to hold the wand so that almost none was left for the rest of their limbs.

 

And they didn’t even seem to realize this.

 

As it was the day was becoming more and more surreal as it passed and Tobirama, like the girl, was beginning to find himself truly unnerved.

 

If they taught some of their infiltration specialists English, hell if they taught their codebreakers and ANBU the language, then this show of diplomacy and use of Eru Lee as bait would no longer be necessary. They could watch, observe, and approach these people at their own discretion after understanding everything they needed to without risking a bloodline more powerful than the Uchiha.

 

Here, with three newly minted genin, sitting in the back of a crowded bar swarmed by people attempting to touch Eru Lee, he felt unreasonably exposed.

 

“Minato!” Jiraiya exclaimed and in a daze Minato looked back to them, blinking, still keeping a wary eye towards the hand shakers.

 

“Um, they say that… They’re calling Lee the girl-who-lived, they say that she… that she won the war, that they’re very grateful to her, that they owe her… And they want to see the scar from when it happened… And…”

 

“Sensei, I’m really freaking out.” Eru Lee exclaimed, leaning backwards with alarm from the latest English shinobi, practically sitting in Minato’s lap to get out of the way, “I don’t think I like being Gandalf Jesus.”

 

Finally, the crowd seemed to listen to McGonagall after a shouted order, with embarrassment they all turned back to their own meals and conversations, and finally left the vicinity of the table.

 

Eru Lee took a too long swing of the golden liquid in front of her, shuddering as she did so, her hands looking as if they were itching for a kunai.

 

McGonagall placed a hand over her eyes and in a contrite tone began speaking, Minato still staring at Lee didn’t respond for some time, just kept watching her but then slowly he repeated what McGonagall had said, “I am terribly sorry that I did not think to warn you. I had forgotten that these are things you wouldn’t know, being foreign, and that Eru Lee herself would not know. When the dark lord died that night, when his spell backfired and Ellie survived, the war was over. A war that we were certain to lose, one where so many had died, was over because of this miracle. Because Eru Lee had survived… the curse of death.”

 

The curse of death. It was probably a last minute translation on Namikaze Minato’s part, but those words resonated, in a way that allowed him a glimpse into what these people saw when they looked at this girl. The curse of death, they were all victims to the curse of death, it was a destiny that none could escape.

 

Except for her, and for him and his brother on her behalf, somehow she had escaped that destiny that humanity had been condemned to without any explanation as of why. Only the idea that Eru Lee was the product of more than a simple blood limit and was something they had never truly seen before.

 

“Right, is that going to happen everywhere?” Jiraiya asked, Minato dutifully translated, to which the woman sighed and gave a small nod and a small explanation.

 

“She has been missing for over a decade, Dumbledore Albus put her into hiding soon after the war had ended, people were very distraught when she disappeared. Now that she’s returned…” Minato trailed off, whether that was where the woman had ended was unclear, but what was clear were the implications.

 

“I wonder, Jiraiya, do you think these people would go to war over a single genin?” Orochimaru asked, perhaps a bit too eagerly, no doubt thinking of his experiments and of proving his mettle in battle once again.

 

“…Can we please go home now?” Lee finally asked, sounding far too desperate for her own good, but for the first time that day everyone seemed to be in agreement.

Even Tobirama himself.

 

(And, once again, before Minerva McGonagall could truly make herself understood, convince Ellie Potter to attend Hogwarts, or even understand what it was Ellie Potter did in this foreign country there was a large crack and she was left with a round of butter-beers and nothing to show for it.)

 

* * *

 

Later, after requesting a memory of the meetings with the foreigners from Minerva, Albus’ eyes would linger upon the dark haired man with golden eyes and something in him would crack with a great realization as well as the idea that somewhere beyond his reach a piece of the dark lord had returned in a new form.

 

* * *

 

To his former student Tobirama offered only this explanation, “… It’s just not worth it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Written back when the characters weren't in England and people were dying to get them there in both this chapter and the next.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


End file.
